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Geopolitical Weekly : Obama and the U.S. Strategy of Buying Time

Released on 2012-10-19 08:00 GMT

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2009-11-02 21:53:43

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Obama and the U.S. Strategy of Buying Time

November 2, 2009

Graphic for Geopolitical Intelligence Report

By George Friedman

Making sense of U.S. President Barack Obama's strategy at this moment is
difficult. Not only is it a work in progress, but the pending decisions
he has to make -- on Iran, Afghanistan and Russia -- tend to obscure
underlying strategy. It is easy to confuse inaction with a lack of
strategy. Of course, there may well be a lack of strategic thinking, but
that does not mean there is a lack of strategy.

Related Link
* Special Series: Obama's Foreign Policy Landscape

Strategy, as we have argued, is less a matter of choice than a matter of
reality imposing itself on presidents. Former U.S. President George W.
Bush, for example, rarely had a chance to make strategy. He was caught
in a whirlwind after only nine months in office and spent the rest of
his presidency responding to events, making choices from a menu of very
bad options. Similarly, Obama came into office with a preset menu of
limited choices. He seems to be fighting to create new choices, not
liking what is on the menu. He may succeed. But it is important to
understand the overwhelming forces that shape his choices and to
understand the degree to which whatever he chooses is embedded in U.S.
grand strategy, a strategy imposed by geopolitical reality.

Empires and Grand Strategy

American grand strategy, as we have argued, is essentially that of the
British Empire, save at a global rather than a regional level. The
British sought to protect their national security by encouraging
Continental powers to engage in land-based conflict, thereby reducing
resources available for building a navy. That guaranteed that Britain's
core interest, the security of the homeland and sea-lane control,
remained intact. Achieving this made the United Kingdom an economic
power in the 19th century by sparing it the destruction of war and
allowing it to control the patterns of international maritime trade.

On occasion, when the balance of power in Europe tilted toward one side
or another, Britain intervened on the Continent with political influence
where possible, direct aid when necessary or -- when all else failed --
the smallest possible direct military intervention. The United Kingdom's
preferred strategy consisted of imposing a blockade -- e.g., economic
sanctions -- allowing it to cause pain without incurring costs.

At the same time that it pursued this European policy, London was
building a global empire. Here again, the British employed a
balance-of-power strategy. In looking at the history of India or Africa
during the 19th century, there is a consistent pattern of the United
Kingdom forming alliances with factions, whether religious or ethnic
groups, to create opportunities for domination. In the end, this was not
substantially different from ancient Rome's grand strategy. Rome also
ruled indirectly through much of its empire, controlling Mediterranean
sea-lanes, but allying with local forces to govern; observing Roman
strategy in Egypt is quite instructive in this regard.

Empires are not created by someone deciding one day to build one, or
more precisely, lasting empires are not. They emerge over time through a
series of decisions having nothing to do with empire building, and
frequently at the hands of people far more concerned with domestic
issues than foreign policy. Paradoxically, leaders who consciously set
out to build empires usually fail. Hitler is a prime example. His
failure was that rather than ally with forces in the Soviet Union, he
wished to govern directly, something that flowed from his ambitions for
direct rule. Particularly at the beginning, the Roman and British
empires were far less ambitious and far less conscious of where they
were headed. They were primarily taking care of domestic affairs. They
became involved in foreign policy as needed, following a strategy of
controlling the seas while maintaining substantial ground forces able to
prevail anywhere -- but not everywhere at once -- and a powerful
alliance system based on supporting the ambitions of local powers
against other local powers.

On the whole, the United States has no interest in empire, and indeed is
averse to imperial adventures. Those who might have had explicit
inclinations in this direction are mostly out of government, crushed by
experience in Iraq. Iraq came in two parts. In the first part, from 2003
to 2007, the U.S. vision was one of direct rule relying on American
sea-lane control and overwhelming Iraq with well-supplied American
troops.

The results were unsatisfactory. The United States found itself arrayed
against all Iraqi factions and wound up in a multipart war in which its
forces were merely one faction arrayed against others. The Petraeus
strategy to escape this trap was less an innovation in counterinsurgency
than a classic British-Roman approach. Rather than attempting direct
control of Iraq, Petraeus sought to manipulate the internal balance of
power, aligning with Sunni forces against Shiite forces, i.e., allying
with the weaker party at that moment against the stronger. The strategy
did not yield the outcome that some Bush strategists dreamed of, but it
might (with an emphasis on might) yield a useful outcome: a precariously
balanced Iraq dependent on the United States to preserve its internal
balance of power and national sovereignty against Iran.

Many Americans, perhaps even most, regret the U.S. intervention in Iraq.
And there are many, again perhaps most, who view broader U.S.
entanglement in the world as harmful to American interests. Similar
views were expressed by Roman republicans and English nationalists who
felt that protecting the homeland by controlling the sea was the best
policy, while letting the rest of the world go its own way. But the
Romans and the British lost that option when they achieved the key to
their own national security: enough power to protect the homeland.
Outsiders inevitably came to see that power as offensive, even though
originally its possessors intended it as defensive. Indeed, intent
aside, the capability for offensive power was there. So frequently, Rome
and Britain threatened the interests of foreign powers simply by being
there. Inevitably, both Rome and Britain became the targets of Hannibals
and Napoleons, and they were both drawn into the world regardless of
their original desires. In short, enough power to be secure is enough
power to threaten others. Therefore, that perfect moment of national
security always turns offensive, as the power to protect the homeland
threatens the security of other countries.

A Question of Size

There are Obama supporters and opponents who also dream of the perfect
balance: security for the United States achieved by not interfering in
the affairs of others. They see foreign entanglements not as providing
homeland security, but as generating threats to it. They do not
understand that what they want, American prosperity without
international risks, is by definition impossible. The U.S. economy is
roughly 25 percent of the world's economy. The American military
controls the seas, not all at the same time, but anywhere it wishes at
any given time. The United States also controls outer space. It is
impossible for the United States not to intrude on the affairs of most
countries in the world simply by virtue of its daily operations. The
United States is an elephant that affects the world simply by being in
the same room with it. The only way to not be an elephant is to shrink
in size, and whether the United States would ever want this aside,
decreasing power is harder to do than it might appear -- and much more
painful.

Obama's challenge is managing U.S. power without decreasing its size and
without imposing undue costs on it. This sounds like an attractive idea,
but it ultimately won't work: The United States cannot be what it is
without attracting hostile attention. For some of Obama's supporters, it
is American behavior that generates hostility. Actually, it is America's
presence -- its very size -- that intrudes on the world and generates
hostility.

On the domestic front, the isolationist-internationalist divide in the
United States has always been specious. Isolationists before World War
II simply wanted to let the European balance of power manage itself.
They wanted to buy time, but had no problem with intervening in China
against Japan. The internationalists simply wanted to move from the
first to the second stage, arguing that the first stage had failed.
There was thus no argument in principle between them; there was simply a
debate over how much time to give the process to see if it worked out.
Both sides had the same strategy, but simply a different read of the
moment. In retrospect, Franklin Roosevelt was right, but only because
France collapsed in the face of the Nazi onslaught in a matter of weeks.
That aside, the isolationist argument was quite rational.

Like that of Britain or Rome, U.S. grand strategy is driven by the sheer
size of the national enterprise, a size achieved less through planning
than by geography and history. Having arrived where it has, the United
States has three layers to its strategy.

First, the United States must maintain the balance of power in various
regions in the world. It does this by supporting a range of powers,
usually the weaker against the stronger. Ideally, this balance of power
maintains itself without American effort and yields relative stability.
But stability is secondary to keeping local powers focused on each other
rather than on the United States: Stability is a rhetorical device, not
a goal. The real U.S. interest lies in weakening and undermining
emergent powers so they don't ultimately rise to challenge American
power. This is a strategy of nipping things in the bud.

Second, where emergent powers cannot be maintained through the regional
balance of power, the United States has an interest in sharing the
burden of containing it with other major powers. The United States will
seek to use such coalitions either to intimidate the emerging power via
economic power or, in extremis, via military power.

Third, where it is impossible to build a coalition to coerce emerging
powers, the United States must decide either to live with the emerging
power, forge an alliance with it, or attack it unilaterally.

Obama, as with any president, will first pursue the first layer of the
strategy, using as little American power as possible and waiting as long
as possible to see whether this works. The key here lies in not taking
premature action that could prove more dangerous or costly than
necessary. If that fails, his strategy is to create a coalition of
powers to share the cost and risk. And only when that fails -- which is
a function of time and politics -- will Obama turn to the third layer,
which can range from simply living with the emerging power and making a
suitable deal or crushing it militarily.

When al Qaeda attacked what it saw as the leading Christian power on
Sept. 11, Bush found himself thrown into the third stage very rapidly.
The second phase was illusory; sympathy aside, the quantity of military
force allies could and would bring to bear was minimal. Even active
allies like Britain and Australia couldn't bring decisive force to bear.
Bush was forced into unilateralism not so much by the lack of will among
allies as by their lack of power. His choice lay in creating chaos in
the Islamic world and then forming alliances out of the debris, or
trying to impose a direct solution through military force. He began with
the second and shifted to the first.

Obama's Choices

Obama has more room to maneuver than Bush had. In the case of Iran, no
regional solution is possible. Israel can only barely reach into the
region, and while its air force might suffice to attack Iranian nuclear
facilities, and air attacks might be sufficient to destroy them, Israel
could not deal with the Iranian response of mining the Strait of Hormuz
and/or destabilizing Iraq. The United States must absorb these blows.

Therefore, Obama has tried to build an anti-Iranian coalition to
intimidate Tehran. Given the Russian and Chinese positions, this seems
to have failed, and Iran has not been intimidated. That leaves Obama
with two possible paths. One is the path followed by Nixon in China:
ally with Iran against Russian influence, accepting it as a nuclear
power and dealing with it through a combination of political alignment
and deterrence. The second option is dealing with Iran militarily.

His choice thus lies between entente or war. He is bluffing war in hopes
of getting what he wants, in the meantime hoping that internal events in
Iran may evolve in a way suitable to U.S. interests or that Russian
economic hardship evolves into increased Russian dependence on the
United States such that Washington can extract Russian concessions on
Iran. Given the state of Iran's nuclear development, which is still not
near a weapon, Obama is using time to try to head off the third stage.

In Afghanistan, where Obama is already in the third stage and where he
is being urged to go deeper in, he is searching for a way to return to
the first stage, wherein an indigenous coalition emerges that
neutralizes Afghanistan through its own internal dynamic. Hence,
Washington is negotiating with the Taliban, trying to strengthen various
factions in Afghanistan and not quite committing to more force. Winter
is coming in Afghanistan, and that is the quiet time in that conflict.
Obama is clearly buying time.

In that sense, Obama's foreign policy is neither as alien as his critics
would argue nor as original as his supporters argue. He is adhering to
the basic logic of American grand strategy, minimizing risks over time
while seeking ways to impose low-cost solutions. It differs from Bush's
policies primarily in that Bush had events forced on him and spent his
presidency trying to regain the initiative.

The interesting point from where we sit is not only how deeply embedded
Obama is in U.S. grand strategy, but how deeply drawn he is into the
unintended imperial enterprise that has dominated American foreign
policy since the 1930s -- an enterprise neither welcomed nor
acknowledged by most Americans. Empires aren't planned, at least not
successful empires, as Hitler and Napoleon learned to their regret.
Empires happen as the result of the sheer reality of power. The elephant
in the room cannot stop being an elephant, nor can the smaller animals
ignore him. No matter how courteous the elephant, it is his power -- his
capabilities -- not his intentions that matter.

Obama is now the elephant in the room. He has bought as much time as
possible to make decisions, and he is being as amiable as possible to
try to build as large a coalition as possible. But the coalition has
neither the power nor appetite for the risks involved, so Obama will
have to decide whether to live with Iran, form an alliance with Iran or
go to war with Iran. In Afghanistan, he must decide whether he can
recreate the balance of power by staying longer and whether this will be
more effective by sending more troops, or whether it is time to begin
withdrawal. In both cases, he can use the art of the bluff to shape the
behavior of others, maybe.

He came into the presidency promising to be more amiable than Bush,
something not difficult given the circumstances. He is now trying to
convert amiability into a coalition, a much harder thing to do. In the
end, he will have to make hard decisions. In American foreign policy,
however, the ideal strategy is always to buy time so as to let the
bribes, bluffs and threats do their work. Obama himself probably doesn't
know what he will do; that will depend on circumstances. Letting events
flow until they can no longer be tolerated is the essence of American
grand strategy, a path Obama is following faithfully.

It should always be remembered that this long-standing American policy
has frequently culminated in war, as with Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman,
Johnson and Bush. It was Clinton's watchful waiting to see how things
played out, after all, that allowed al Qaeda the time to build and
strike. But this is not a criticism of Clinton -- U.S. strategy is to
trade time for risk. Over time, the risk might lead to war anyway, but
then again, it might not. If war does come, American power is still
decisive, if not in creating peace, then certainly in wreaking havoc
upon rising powers. And that is the foundation of empire.

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